Slowly, slowly

We're slowly making progress! We completed class #4 of 7 last night and we've made really great progress on our paper work. Tomorrow we go get our fingerprints done and then just have a few more things to wrap up before we'll be ready to turn in our big packet. I think we'll have a little celebration once we turn that in :)

One big thing on our minds that goes along with that is that when we turn in our paperwork we also have to pay $1200 to cover the next part of the process, the homestudy. Then after we've been totally certified and our family profile is put in to their "match book" we'll pay another $1000 (that's probably in another 3 months or so). And then the big final huge amount won't be due until our baby is legally ours. So I'm beginning to pull together our plan for how we are going to fund raise to cover these costs.

I've been raising funds for missions and ministry staff positions since I was 16 years old, but fund raising is still a bit intimidating. But I'm really excited at the thought of having a whole family of supporters joining us on this journey, tracking with us through the whole experience, and really saying "Yes! We believe God is going to bring your baby home through adoption and we want to help make that happen!" It's another leap of faith, but we do believe that God will provide all the money that's needed to cover every single cost. So the invitation has now officially been made to join us in bringing baby home :)

So you'll notice the first little thing I did was to put a PayPal button up there on the top of the right sidebar. Obviously any donations made through PayPal or given directly to us will not be tax-deductible. I'm talking with my pastor about the possibility of people being able to send their donations through our church so that they could be tax-deductible. I'll update you on that once we get the details worked out.

I'm wrestling through the idea of starting a separate adoption blog/website that has simple info about our story, our adoption details (with short updates as things progress) and info on making donations- or.... just sticking with this one. Obviously this is a really personal blog, but I don't have anything to hide necessarily. But I also don't want people to feel lost in all my super long posts. What do you think?

Carrie